The Shadow of the Torturer botns-1

by Gene Wolfe

  He strode off motioning for us to follow; I noticed that his boots, which seemed to have been greased, sank in the sedge even deeper than my own. Agia said, “She’s not coming with us.” Still it was obvious that she (Dorcas) was, trailing along behind Agia and looking so forlorn that I dropped behind to try to comfort her. “I’d lend you my mantle,” I whispered to her, “if it weren’t so wet it would make you colder than you are already. But if you’ll go along this track the other way, you’ll come out of here altogether and into a corridor where it’s warmer and drier, Then if you’ll look for a door with Jungle Garden on it, that will let you into a place where the sun is warm and you’ll be quite comfortable.”

  I had no sooner spoken than I remembered the pelycosaur we had seen in the jungle. Fortunately, perhaps, Dorcas showed no sign of having heard what I said. Something in her face conveyed that she was afraid of Agia, or at least aware, in a helpless way, of having displeased her; but there was no other indication she was any more alert to her surroundings than a somnambulist. Conscious that I had failed to relieve her misery, I began again. “There’s a man in the corridor, a curator. I’m sure he’ll at least try to find some clothes and a fire for you.”

  The wind whipped Agia’s chestnut hair as she looked back at us. “There are too many of these beggar girls for anyone to be worried about one, Severian. Including yourself.”

  At the sound of Agia’s voice, Hildegrin glanced over his shoulder. “I know a woman might take her in. Yes, and clean her up and give her some clothes. There’s a high-bred shape under that mud, thin though she is.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Agia snapped, “You contract laborers, according to your card, but what’s your business here?”

  “Just what you said, Mistress. My business.”

  Dorcas had begun to shiver. “Honestly,” I told her, “all you have to do is go back. It’s much warmer in the corridor. Don’t go in the Jungle Garden. You might go into the Sand Garden, it’s sunny and dry in there.” Something in what I had said seemed to touch a chord in her. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

  “The Sand Garden? You’d like that?”

  Very softly: “Sun.”

  “Here’s the old scow now,” Hildegrin announced. “With so many, we’re going to have to be particular about the seatin’. And there’s to be no movin’ about—she’ll be low in the water. One of the women in the bow, please, and the other and the young armiger in the stem.”

  I said, “I’d be happy to take an oar.”

  “Ever rowed before? I thought not. No, you’d best sit in the stern like I told you. It ain’t much harder pullin’ two oars than one, and I’ve done it many a time, beheve me, though there was half a dozen in her with me.” His boat was like himself, wide, rough, and heavy-looking. Bow and stem were square, so much so that there was hardly any horizontal taper from the waist, where the rowlocks were, though the hull was shallower at the ends. Hildegrin got in first, and standing with one leg to either side of the bench, used an oar to nudge the boat closer to shore for us.

  “You,” Agia said, taking Dorcas by the arm. “You sit up there in front.” Dorcas seemed willing to obey, but Hildegrin stopped her. “If you don’t mind, Mistress,” he said to Agia, “I’d sooner it was you in the bow. I won’t be able to keep my eye on her, you see, when I’m rowin’, unless she sits behind. She’s not right, which even you and me can agree on, and low as we’ll be I’d like to know if she starts friskin’ around.”

  Dorcas surprised us all by saying, “I’m not mad. It’s just… I feel as if I’ve just been wakened.”

  Hildegrin made her sit in the stern with me nonetheless. “Now this,” he said as he pushed us off, “this is something you’re not likely to forget if you’ve never done it before. Crossin’ the Lake of Birds here in the middle of the Garden of Everlastin’ Sleep.” His oars dipping into the water made a dull and somehow melancholy sound.

  I asked why it was called the Lake of Birds.

  “Because so many’s found dead in the water, is what some say. But it might only be that that’s because there’s so many here. There’s a great deal said against Death. I mean by the people that has to die, drawin’ her picture like a crone with a sack, and all that. But she’s a good friend to birds, Death is. Wherever there’s dead men and quiet, you’ll find a good many birds, that’s been my experience.”

  Recalling how the thrushes sang in our necropolis, I nodded. “Now if you’ll look past my shoulder, you’ll have a clear view of the shore ahead of us and be able to see a lot of things you couldn’t before, because of the rushes growin’ all around you back there. You’ll notice, if it’s not too misty, that the land rises farther on. The bogginess stops there, and the trees begin. Can you see ‘em?”

  I nodded again, and beside me Dorcas nodded as well. “That’s because this whole peep show is meant to look like the mouth of a dead volcaner. The mouth of a dead man is what some say, but that’s not really so. If it was, they’d of put in teeth. You’ll remember, though, that when you come in here you come up through a pipe in the ground.”

  Once more, Dorcas and I nodded together. Though Agia was no more than two strides from us, she was nearly out of sight behind Hildegrin’s broad shoulders and fearnought coat.

  “Over there,” he continued, jerking his square chin to show the direction, “you ought to be able to see a spot of black. Just about halfway up, it is, between the bog and the rim. Some sees it and thinks it’s where they come out of, but that’s behind you and lower down, and a whole lot smaller. This that you see now is the Cave of the Cumaean—the woman that knows the future and the past and everything else. There’s some that say this whole place was built only for her, though I don’t believe it.”

  Softly, Dorcas asked, “How could that be?” and Hildegrin misunderstood her, or at least pretended to do so.

  “The Autarch wants her here, so they say, so he can come and talk without travelin’ to the other side of the world. I wouldn’t know about that, but sometimes I see somebody walkin’ around up there, and metal or maybe a jewel or two flashin’. Who it is I wouldn’t know, and since I don’t want to know my future—and I know my past, I should think, better than her—I don’t go near the cave. People come sometimes hopin’ to know when they’ll be married, or about success in trade. But I’ve observed they don’t often come back.” We had nearly reached the center of the lake. The Garden of Endless Sleep rose around us like the sides of a vast bowl, mossy with pines toward the lip, scummed with rushes and sedge below. I was still very cold, more so because of the inactivity of sitting in the boat while another rowed; I was beginning to worry about what the immersion in water might do to the blade of Terminus Est if I did not dry and oil it soon, yet even so, the spell of the place held me. (A spell there was, surely, in this garden. I could almost hear it humming over the water, voices chanting in a Ianguage I did not know but understood.) I think it held everyone, even Hildegrin, even Agia. For some time we rowed in silence; I saw geese, alive and content for all I could tell, bobbing a long way off; and once, like something in a dream, the nearly human face of a manatee looking into my own through a few spans of brownish water.

  24. THE FLOWER OF DISSOLUTION

  Beside me, Dorcas plucked a water hyacinth and put it in her hair. Except for the vague spot of white on the bank some distance ahead, it was the first flower I had seen in the Garden of Endless Sleep; I looked for others, but saw none. Is it possible the flower came into being only because Dorcas reached for it? In daylight moments, I know as well as the next that such things are impossible; but I am writing by night, and then, when I sat in that boat with the hyacinth less than a cubit from my eyes, I wondered at the dim light and recalled Hildegrin’s remark of a moment before, a remark that implied (though quite possibly he did not know it) that the seeress’s cave, and thus this garden, was on the opposite side of the world. There, as Master Malrubius had taught us long ago, all was reversed: warmth to the south, cold to th
e north; light at night, dark by day; snow in summer. The chill I felt would be appropriate then, for it would be summer soon, with sleet riding the wind; the darkness that stood even between my eyes and the blue flowers of the water hyacinth would be appropriate then too, for it would soon be night, with light already in the sky. The Increate maintains all things in order surely; and the theologicans say light is his shadow. Must it not be then that in darkness order grows ever less, flowers leaping from nothingness into a girl’s fingers just as by light in spring they leap from mere filthiness into the air? Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps, indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a randomization of the waves of energy (like a sea), the fields of energy (like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes—set by light in an order of which they themselves are incapable—to be the real world.

  Mist was rising from the water, reminding me first of the swirling motes of straw in the insubstantial cathedral of the Pelerines, then of steam from the soup kettle when Brother Cook carried it into the refectory on a winter afternoon. The witches were said to stir such kettles; but I had never seen one, though their tower stood hardly a chain from ours. I remembered that we rowed across the crater of a volcano. Might it not have been the Cumaean’s kettle? Urth’s fires were long dead, as Master Malrubius had taught us; it was more than possible that they had cooled long before men had risen from the position of the beasts to cumber her face with their cities. But witches, it was said, raised the dead. Might not the Cumaean raise the dead fires to boil her pot? I dipped my fingers into the water; it was as cold as snow.

  Hildegrin leaned toward me as he rowed, then drew away as he pulled his oars. “Goin’ to your death,” he said. “That’s what you’re thinkin’. I can see it in your face. To the Sanguin’ry Field, and he’ll kill you, whoever he is.”

  “Are you?” Dorcas asked, and gripped my hand.

  When I did not answer, Hildegrin nodded for me. “Don’t have to, you know.

  There’s them that doesn’t follow the rules, and yet runs free.”

  “You’re mistaken,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about monomachy—or dying either.”

  In my ear, too softly, I think, even for Hildegrin to hear, Dorcas said, “Yes, you were. Your face was full of beauty, of a kind of nobility. When the world is horrible, then thoughts are high, full of grace and greatness.” I looked at her, thinking she was mocking me, but she was not, “The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this.” A movement of her eyes took in all the lake. “But the quantities are the same, we change only their proportion here or there.”

  “I would tilt it as far back as I can, until at last the evil runs out altogether,” I said.

  “It might be the good that would run out. But I am like you; I would bend time backward if I could.”

  “Nor do I believe that beautiful thoughts—or wise ones—are engendered by external troubles.”

  “I did not say beautiful thoughts, but thoughts of grace and greatness, though I suppose that is a kind of beauty. Let me show you.” She lifted my hand and slipping it inside her rags pressed it to her right breast. I could feel the nipple, as firm as a cherry, and the warmth of the gentle mound beneath it, delicate, feather-soft and alive with racing blood. “Now,” she said, “what are your thoughts? If I have made the external world sweet to you, aren’t they less than they were?”

  “Where did you learn all this?” I asked. Her face was drained of its wisdom, which condensed in crystal drops at the corners of her eyes.

  The shore on which the averns grew was less marshy than the other. It seemed strange, after having walked on buoyant sedge and floated on water for so long, to set foot again on soil that was no worse than soft. We had landed at some distance from the plants; but we were near enough now that they were no longer a mere bank of white, but growths of definite color and shape, whose size could be readily estimated. I said, “They are not from here, are they? Not from our Urth.” No one replied; I think I must have spoken too softly for any of the others (except perhaps Dorcas) to hear.

  They had a stiffness, a geometrical precision, surely born under some other sun. The color of their leaves was that of a scarab’s back, but infused with tints at once deeper and more translucent. It seemed to imply the existence of light somewhere, some inconceivable distance away, of a spectrum that would have withered or perhaps ennobled the world.

  As we walked nearer, Agia leading the way—I following her with Dorcas behind me, and Hildegrin following us—I saw that each leaf was like a dagger blade, stiff and pointed, with edges sharp enough to satisfy even Master Gurloes. Above these leaves, the half-closed white blossoms we had seen from across the lake seemed creations of pure beauty, virginal fantasies guarded by a hundred knives. They were wide and lush, and their petals curled in a way that should have seemed tousled if it had not formed a complex swirling pattern that drew the eye like a spiral limned on a revolving disc.

  Agia said, “Good form requires that you pick the plant yourself, Severian. But I’ll go with you and show you how. The trick is to put your arm under the lowest leaves, and snap the stem off at the ground.”

  Hildegrin caught her by the shoulder. “That you won’t, Mistress,” he said. And then to me, “You go forward since you’re of a mind to, young sieur. I’ll take the females to safety.”

  I was already several strides past him, but I stopped for an instant when he spoke. Luckily Dorcas called out, “Be careful!” at that moment, and I was able to pretend it was her warning that had halted me.

  The truth was otherwise. From the time we had met Hildegrin, I had felt certain I had encountered him before, though the shock of recognition that had come so swiftly when I saw Sieur Racho again was in this instance long delayed. Now it had come at last, with paralyzing force.

  As I have said, I remember everything; but often I can find a fact, face, or feeling only after a long search. I suppose that in this case, the problem was that from the moment he had bent over me on the sedge track I could see him clearly, and previously I had hardly seen him at all. It was only when he said, “I’ll take these females to safety,” that my memory closed upon his voice. “The leaves are poisoned,” Agia called. “Twisting your mantle tight about your arm will give you some protection, but try not to touch them. And watch out—you are always closer to an avern than you think.”

  I nodded to show I understood.

  Whether the avern is deadly to the life of its own world I have no way of knowing. It may be that it is not, that it is only dangerous to us by reason of a nature accidentally inimical to our own. Whether that is so or not, the ground between and beneath the plants was covered with short and very fine grass, grass quite different from the coarse growth elsewhere; and this short grass was littered with the curled bodies of bees and dotted with the white bones of birds.

  When I was no more than a couple of paces from the plants, I stopped, suddenly aware of a problem I had given no thought to previously. The avern I selected would be my weapon in the contest to come—yet because I knew nothing as yet of the way it would be fought, I had no means of judging which plant might be best adapted to it. I could have gone back and questioned Agia, but I would have felt absurd examining a woman on such a matter, and in the end I decided to trust my judgment, since she would no doubt send me back for another if my first choice were wholly unsuitable.

  The averns varied in height from seedlings of hardly more than a span to old plants of three cubits or a little less. These older plants had fewer, though larger, leaves. Those of the smaller ones were narrower, and so closely spaced that the stems were completely hidden; those of the big plants were much broader in proportion to their length, and somewhat separated on the fleshy-looking stems. If (as seemed likely) the Septentrion and I were to use our plants as maces, the largest possible plant with the longest possible stem and the
stoutest possible leaves would be the best. But these all grew well away from the edges of the planting, so that it would be necessary to break down a number of smaller plants to reach them; and to do that by the method Agia had advised was clearly impossible, because the leaves of many of the smaller plants grew nearly to the ground.

  In the end I chose one about two cubits high. I had knelt beside it and was reaching toward it when as though a veil had been snatched away I realized that my hand, which I had thought still several spans from the needlelike point of the nearest leaf, was about to be impaled. I drew it back hurriedly; the plant seemed almost out of reach—indeed, I was not certain I could touch its stem even by lying prone. The temptation to use my sword was very great, but I felt it would disgrace me before Agia and Dorcas to do so, and I knew I would have to handle the plant during the combat in any case.

  I advanced my hand again, cautiously, this time keeping my forearm in contact with the ground, and discovered that though I had to press my shoulder against the grass as well to prevent my upper arm from being stabbed by the lowest leaves, I could touch the stem quite readily. A point that appeared to be half a cubit from my face trembled with my breath.

  It was while I was snapping off the stem—no easy task—that I saw the reason only the short, soft grass flourished beneath the averns. One of the leaves of the plant I was breaking had cut half through a blade of coarse marsh grass, and the entire grass plant, almost an ell across, had begun to wither. Once picked, the plant was an enormous nuisance, as I ought to have anticipated. It would plainly have been impossible to carry it in Hildegrin’s boat as it was without killing one or more of us, so before we reembarked I had to climb the slope and cut a sapling. When the twigs had been lopped, Agia and I bound the avern to one end of its spindly trunk, so that as we made our way through the city later, I appeared to be bearing some grotesque standard. Then Agia explained the use of the plant as a weapon; and I broke a second plant (although she objected, and at even greater risk, I fear, than before, since I was somewhat too confident) and practiced what she had told me. The avern is not, as I had assumed, merely a viper-toothed mace. Its leaves can be detached by twisting them between the thumb and forefinger in such a way that the hand does not contact the edges or the point. The leaf is then in effect a handleless blade, envenomed and razor-sharp, ready to throw. The fighter holds the plant in his left hand by the base of the stem and plucks the lower leaves to throw with his right. Agia cautioned me, however, to keep my own plant out of my opponent’s reach, since as the leaves are removed an area of bare stem appears, and this he might grasp and use to wrest my plant from me. When I flourished the second plant and practiced striking out with it and picking and throwing the leaves, I found that my own avern was likely to be almost as great a danger to me as the Septentrion’s. If I held it near me, there was a grave risk of pricking my arm or chest with the long lower leaves; and the flower with its swirling pattern held my gaze whenever I glanced down to tear off a leaf, and with the dry lust of death sought to draw me to it. All this seemed unpleasant enough; but when I had learned to keep my eyes away from the half-closed blossom, I reflected that my opponent would be exposed to the same dangers.